Not having sampled every hike in America, I really can’t say. But I have done my fair share of treks and will say this much: The portion of the JMT I saw contained the most beautiful natural scenery I’ve ever encountered in real life.

The trip isn’t easy, even before you reach the trail head. It entailed months of reading guidebooks and maps, huffing and puffing up hills, searching for tolerable dehydrated food, buying lightweight gear, returning lightweight gear for ultralight gear, and casting about desperately for friends foolish enough to put up with all of the above.

The hiking companions, from left to right, Eric Ragland, Markkus Rovito and Johanna Hoadley.

I eventually found three such suckers pals (pictured to the left) and we settled on doing the first 50 miles of the trail over six days in September. We hiked from Happy Isles in Yosemite Valley to Agnew Meadows, near Mammoth Lake, Ca. The itinerary entailed climbing 7,000 feet, basically all of it packed into days one, two and four.

Weighed down with our 35 to 40 pound packs, it was … a bit much.

But once we crossed over Donohue Pass, the high point of the trip at 11,056 feet, our moods brightened considerably. In part, it was because the hardest part was over; in part, it was because the scenery had gone from beautiful to absolutely stunning.

I had hardly noticed the steep final push over Donohue because I was so busy swiveling my head to catch the views. Everywhere was another snowcapped mountain peak, a valley etched with snaking streams, granite outcroppings beneath a blue sky.

On the far side of the pass, it seemed like we were walking through a fairyland. The colors appeared over saturated. The arrangement of wildflowers and rocks and creeks felt like a master class in feng shui.

We had reached a landscape you couldn’t glimpse from any highway turnout. You could only see this if you hiked a dozen or so miles with a big, heavy pack on your back.

That made it all the more special and, in the end, all the work worthwhile.

Banner Peak

Banner Peak around mile 43 on the John Muir Trail.

Hopefully the video above, which features time lapse imagery from throughout our trip, offers at least a taste of the beauty we encountered along the way.

(For the gear heads out there, the pictures were all shot on a Canon 5D Mark II using 28 mm and 50 mm lenses, usually with a GorillaPod Focus and a Phottix intervalometer. It was edited in Final Cut).